Secret of the Slaves (14 page)

“Heavy metals?” Dan asked.

“Oh, yes. The Amazon Basin is rich in heavy metals, didn't you know?”

“So the radioactivity gets them?”

“Not at all. That would take years, decades. Heavy-metal poisoning works much faster.” She shook her head. “Then there's the mercury used in amalgamation-extraction methods in the open-pit operation. Workers get the mercury on their skin or breathe in the vapors. Eventually they become so deranged and feeble-minded they can't function anymore. Then they go in the cage—or are simply set loose in the colony to fend for themselves.”

“What happens to them in here?” Annja asked.

“They kill or are killed,” Lidia said.

“So that scraggly looking bunch we saw earlier—” Dan said.

“A gang of former laborers.”

“They fight the guards?” Annja said.

Lidia shrugged. “Or each other. Here, life is boiled down to its essentials. Some people choose to cooperate with one another. Others live as if it's a war of all against all.”

She led them onward. The colony must be larger even than it looked from the air, Annja thought. The tension had her heart racing and the sweat soaking her more than the brutal river-basin heat would account for.

Automatic fire roared ahead of them. More than one gun was firing. Then something blew up with a crack like an ax splitting the sky.

Crouching, Lidia led them forward to peer above a line of plastic drums. Annja's heart was in her throat and thrashing like a wounded bird. She saw nothing in their immediate vicinity. One or two streets to their right they caught glimpses of men running, shouting, shooting.

“What's going on?” she asked in a low voice.

Lidia shrugged. “Mercenaries fighting.”

“Private dispute,” Dan said, “or some kind of rivalry coming from the top down?”

“Who knows? Both are possible. But we must get close,” Lidia said.

“Why?” Annja asked in alarm.

“Our objective lies that way,” she said.

“Can't we just go around?” Dan asked.

“We must cut as close as we can. This is a very bad part of the colony we come to,” Lidia said earnestly.

Annja shared a wide-eyed look with Dan. Worse things than a firefight? she wondered.

Gunfire rose and fell in surges. A grenade thumped. Someone screamed briefly.

“Some people are seriously annoyed at each other,” Dan said.

“I guess we go get a closer look,” Annja said in resignation.

They slipped forward as furtively as they could. That seemed to annoy Dan.

“Why creep around like mice?” he demanded. “The camp inhabitants are either heading somewhere else in a hurry or lying low, given the amount of kinetic energy and flying chunks of metal being tossed about so cavalierly by those boys up ahead. And none of them's going to be paying the least bit of attention to anybody but who they're shooting at. Or who's shooting at them.”

Annja kept her head turning from side to side. “I don't want to die for an assumption. Nor get run up on by reinforcements. Not to mention some new team looking to get in the game.”

Dan drew in a long unhappy breath. “Good point.”

They advanced between two rows of the two-story containers-turned-dwellings, into a region of ramshackle huts. In fact this seemed the end of the scrapped containers, which, hot as they'd be in the sunlight, at least were sturdy and would keep off the storms. In front of the trio a nasty shantytown stood, or leaned, for at least a hundred yards before butting up against the twelve-foot perimeter fence. The spirals of knife wire at its top glittered in the sun. Beyond stood the green wall of the rain forest, at once inviting and forbidding.

Lidia led them into a hut. Annja hung back, perhaps even more unwilling to violate a private dwelling than she would have been in some ritzy suburb back home. Some modicum of personal space was about the only thing resembling dignity these people had. To invade that seemed wrong.

“It's all right,” Lidia said, with the closest thing to a smile Annja had seen ghosting quickly across her features like a cloud across the sun. “No one lives here right now.”

The place stank of death and buzzed with flies. Annja guessed an occupant had died and spent a few days decomposing in the jungle heat and humidity before being collected by the periodic sanitation sweeps. The hovel seemed to consist of planks and shreds of reeking cloth.

They seemed to have entered the no-man's-land of the battle. To their left Annja saw men in bluish-gray camos leaning out from cover and shooting with what appeared to be M16s and the shorter M-4 carbine versions. They had the beefy, well-packed look she associated with the U.S. military, and seemed to be mostly white or black. Annja guessed they were North American mercs—or security contractors, as the government liked to say. She suspected that they, too, had been attracted to Feliz Lusitânia by honeyed lies and trapped no less thoroughly than the wretches in that horrific cage in the river. There were ways to keep even men with guns in their place.

Chief among those were other men with guns. Those men wore green-and-black camouflage. They might have been Brazilians, but for some reason Annja wondered if they might hail from Cuba or even Africa. One reason was their weapons—they fired chunky assault rifles with an unmistakable broken-nosed profile.

“Kalashnikovs?” she asked. “Do the camp directors equip their forces with those? Russian-made guns?” She added the latter in case the doctor wasn't up on firearms minutiae.

“Who knows?” she murmured. “They hire killers from all over the world. Wherever they can get them.”

“Why would they equip guards with RPGs?” Dan asked. “Those're antitank weapons, and there's a notable lack of armored vehicles around here.”

“The guards use them sometimes,” Lidia said. “So the factions smuggle the rockets and launchers in to their own fighters. Among other things.”

“They smuggle in rockets to blow up their own armored cars?” Dan shook his head. “This place is totally screwed.”

A beefy mercenary leaned out to fire off three quick 3-round bursts from an M-4. One of the smaller men in green and black hopped out from the dubious cover of a lean-to and sent an RPG buzzing and smoking from his shoulder launcher. The merc dived out of view. The shack he had been using for cover erupted in a white flash and white smoke, followed quickly by billowing orange-and-blue flames.

“Great,” Dan said. Annja was pleased to see that, like her and Lidia, he was keeping low. She tried not to think just how little protection the shack would give them against a random burst of gunfire. “If a fire starts—”

“Not much danger of that,” Lidia said. “It rains so much, the wood is constantly soaked.” Even as she said it the flames were dying down. Whether the shooter or any of his buddies had been killed or injured by the blast, Annja couldn't tell. She couldn't hear anybody screaming, anyway.

“We need to move,” Annja said.

“Which direction?” Dan asked.

Another merc whipped around a corner on the far side of the street from the smoldering wreck of a shack to fire a grenade launcher up the street. The RPG man had already ducked into cover. Three grenades boomed off in the street and inside one of the huts. The blasts caused little visible damage as the gaps in the walls allowed a lot of the blast pressure to escape.

“Left,” Annja said. “The ones in gray seem to put out a way bigger volume of fire.”

Dan grinned. “I like the way you think.”

To Annja's surprise they got past the firefight without great difficulty. The worst part was crossing the relatively wide road where the shoot-out was actually taking place. Lidia insisted on crossing no more than thirty yards behind the rearmost of the mercenaries they could detect. Yet despite what the movies showed, Annja knew from firsthand experience—both dealing out gunfire and receiving it—that bullets don't evaporate harmlessly into thin air if they miss. Indeed, modern high-velocity rifle rounds don't reliably stop even when they hit their targets.

Annja doubted anyone would pay them any mind. The two groups were too intent on killing each other, and not being killed by each other. But there was a rhythm to a firefight, Annja knew from experience. Lidia and Dan both seemed equally aware, probably for the same reason, she figured.

After observing for a while they were able to anticipate the lulls. They made their move at an opportune moment. They found themselves in surroundings that managed to be even less appealing than the quarter-mile or more of hell they'd crossed to get there.

Where earlier they had seen few people except for armed gangs of one sort or another, now they caught flashes of furtive movement inside shadowed shacks, gleams of sunlight on eyeballs peering through windows or less formal gaps in rude walls. Now and again a man or even a woman, usually lean and scarred as an old wolf, stood glaring at them openly from a doorway.

“What's with this action?” Dan asked. Following Lidia's example, he and Annja walked upright down the middle of the streets and alleys. Annja felt the constant pressure of eyeballs—there was clearly no point in stealth any longer. “Don't these people have jobs to go to?”

“Not anymore,” Lidia said. “They have found they cannot escape outside the walls, between the selva and the Indians. But this part of the camp they can escape to. The guards do not come farther than those we just came past.”

“Why doesn't the whole slave-labor population just flood right into here, then?” Dan asked.

“Because even the slaves enjoy some measure of security. They are fed, if badly. Here there is no support, no security, but what one can grab for oneself. Or one's comrades.”

“But you seem pretty familiar with this part of the camp,” Annja said, “and pretty unafraid.” Indeed, the gaunt doctor seemed to be walking more erect than at any time since she had crept apologetically into the commissary in what seemed like a whole earlier incarnation.

Lidia smiled again. “I live here. I told you, I provide valuable services to the community, which everyone recognizes. These people protect me precisely because they are so desperate. And here at least I am safe from rape by the guards.”

Annja shuddered. No matter how horrible life in this hole seems, she thought, I just keep finding out it's actually
worse.

“So even in the Citadel—” Dan began.

“Please,” said Lidia without looking at him. Annja waved a pipe-down hand at him. He actually looked sheepish for a moment.

T
HE MAN THEY SOUGHT
had obviously been dying for a long time. And he'd been dying hard.

Looking at him lying on a pile of rags with a skinny woman kneeling by his side and mopping his face with water from an old paint can with the label long gone, Annja guessed they had arrived just in time.

A peculiarly horrific, sweetish smell came from him. It seemed concentrated on a bandage, which must have been white at one point, and was now pretty thoroughly blackened, wound about his narrow middle.

“Gangrene?” Dan asked, sniffing and then wincing. “I thought you could only get that on an arm or a leg.”

Lidia shook her head. “Anywhere in the body where blood supply is cut off,” she said, “the tissue dies and becomes gangrenous. It is far advanced in his bowels. He suffered multiple gunshot wounds. It is a wonder he has hung on so long.”

“Was he shot here? In the camp?” Dan asked.

“I do not know. He simply appeared here, two weeks ago, already wounded. He had bandaged himself after a fashion,” the doctor replied.

“Appeared here?” Dan echoed. “You mean, in the camp?”

Lidia nodded.

“But how can somebody get into a place like this? And why?”

She shrugged. “There are ways. The walls are meant to keep men in not out—and even then, there are always ways for those willing to take risks. And there are those for whom the forest and the poisonous snakes and even the Indians are no barrier.

“As to why, the good God might know. But he has clearly turned his face away from the camp. If you ask him, I promise he will not answer. No matter how loudly you scream and plead.”

Annja looked to the woman at the dying man's side. She was emaciated, as well as of slight stature. Annja could not tell how old she was—she might have been a prematurely aged teenager or a middle-aged woman.

“Please,” Annja said in Portuguese.

The woman never glanced her way.

“If she understands Portuguese,” Lidia said, “or English or Spanish, she never shows a sign. I believe she is Indian, but even that is a guess. She appeared two days after he did.”

“What's he doing here?” Annja said. “Other than the obvious.”

“You mean dying? Why do you fear to say the word? Believe me, he knows,” Lidia said.

“I'm sorry,” Annja whispered.

“He waits,” Lidia said. “That much I know. He has said as much.”

“What else has he said?” Dan asked.

Lidia frowned. She shook her head sharply. “Strange things,” she said. “Impossible things. He is delirious. He cannot separate legend from fact.”

Annja knelt on the other side of him from his faithful attendant. The stench of his decay was like a blow. The crouching woman shot her a hot-eyed look, but something in Annja's manner seemed to reassure her. She went back to her monotonous task of giving the man what tiny comfort was available. Annja wondered what he was to her, and she to him. Lover? Daughter? Comrade in arms? She doubted she would ever know.

Leaning close to his ear, she said, “Promessa.”

With startling speed, his hand flashed out and caught her by the right wrist. She managed to quell the urge to flinch away.

“I did wrong,” the man said with enormous effort. “I hope that I have paid enough. And I must have, for now you have come to take me home to the
quilombo
of dreams!”

He turned his ghastly face to her and smiled. His teeth seemed to swim in blood. Through it they looked shockingly white.

“What do you remember?” she asked, hating herself.

The tortured brow furrowed, causing the sweat to eat new runnels through the grime that caked his face despite the silent woman's constant attention. “I was not—not supposed to remember. Yet now the memories come back to me. Sweet, so sweet.”